IN THE summer of 1969, artist Mitchell Jamieson travelled from his home outside Washington DC to Pearl Harbor, where he boarded the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. After a voyage a few hundred miles to the south-west, the massive ship waited on the open sea for an arrival from the sky: the Apollo 11 astronauts, back from the first moon landing.

For days, Jamieson was able to eavesdrop on the astronauts' transmissions from space. He heard the words of the men standing on an alien world hundreds of thousands of miles away and filled accordion-style notebooks with sketches those impressions inspired. He listened in as astronaut Michael Collins orbited the moon alone, more isolated than any man in history.The result is First Look, a work of ink on paper that shows a man's face framed by a space helmet, filled with the wonder - or terror - of the cosmos.

Jamieson's piece is one of many NASA-commissioned works now on display in the exhibit "NASA/ART: 50 Years of Exploration" at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. The NASA art programme was the brainchild of agency administrator James Webb, who wanted to bring an artist's eye to America's new vertical phase of exploration. The programme's first outing was to take seven artists to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for the launch of the final Mercury mission.

It was 1963, barely two years after the first person had gone into space. The cold war was in full swing and people got excited whenever something blasted off. "Everybody was paying attention to it and watching it with bated breath," says Jim Dean, an artist who worked at NASA from 1961 to 1974 and was the first director of the programme. "It was never a problem getting artists involved," he says. "It really tantalised the imagination."

How things have changed in the 50 years since President John F. Kennedy announced his intention to put a man on the moon. Now the space shuttle programme is winding down, with no US human space-flight programme to replace it until at least 2015.

The exhibit brings back some of that early wonder of the space programme. In a night-time painting by Jamieson, a massive gantry looms, obscuring a Saturn 1B rocket being readied for launch. In a painting by Norman Rockwell (above), astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young are depicted in the artist's classic all-American style being helped by two technicians into heavy space suits for their 1965 Gemini flight. Rockwell once likened the astronauts to knights climbing into their armour, assisted by their pages.

Though it is the astronauts that most readily capture the public imagination, uncrewed flights bring back some of the most interesting scientific results. One of the more surprising objects in the exhibit is a gown made of fabric printed with 3D images from the Mars Pathfinder mission. In another work, a wheel like those on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity has a plastic, metal and stone Mars-scape nestled in its hollow interior.

There is also a video of the renowned Kronos string quartet playing a piece based on plasma waves detected by the Voyager craft. At times they play high, ghostly chords; then long, melodic lines are tossed between the viola and cello while stars twinkle on a screen behind.

These works remind us that even after the last shuttle flight, NASA exploration will continue to drive science - and art, too.